Special: Behind the Scenes at the Iran Talks in Vienna and Donald Trump's "Washing Machine" of Money

ANNOUNCER : This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra .

MS. IFILL : Hello, and welcome to the Washington Week Webcast Extra , as you just heard. I’m joined around the table by Michael Crowley of POLITICO , Jeanne Cummings of The Wall Street Journal , Indira Lakshmanan of Bloomberg News, and David Sanger of The New York Times .

As we watched the Iran negotiations reach their climax, we focused on a few key personalities: John Kerry, Javad Zarif. But who were the key players most of us never heard about, David?

MR. SANGER : Well, I would say that one of them was Ali Akbar Salehi, who was – is the head of the Iranian atomic energy agency, used to be the foreign minister of Iran. And what was fascinating about him was that he showed up, because he had been a key negotiator back in Lausanne in March and April, and then he fell very ill. He went through three surgeries. And by the time they got to Vienna, he wasn’t there. And one of the most critical things the United States was worried about was that they couldn’t get any of the nuclear negotiators to make a decision without him.

So the Iranian foreign minister, on the pretense of going back to have consultations in Tehran, got onto his airplane from Vienna, flew back to Tehran, picked him up and brought him back into Vienna. And only then did this whole thing really get on the road.

MS. IFILL : And also the sultan of Oman. He was another behind the scenes player.

MR. SANGER : The sultan of Oman was. This was two-and-a-half years ago. He – you know, a lot of people would come to the Obama White House and say, I can work out a deal with the supreme leader. At one point, Jim Jones, the former national security adviser, said not a week went by when somebody didn’t come by with an offer to get it going. But the sultan of Oman actually delivered. Remember those hikers who got imprisoned?

MS. IFILL : Yeah.

MR. SANGER : He helped get them out. And that convinced President Obama that he had some juice in Tehran. That’s what began the secret negotiations in which Jake Sullivan and Bill Burns, two of the top aides to Hillary Clinton, basically went over and started getting this going.

MS. IFILL : I want to take – Indira to take us behind the scenes. I know you guys were standing outside with your ears pressed to doors there at the Coburg Palais. (Laughter.)

MS. LAKSHMANAN : Literally. (Laughs.)

MS. IFILL : Literally, hoping for any little tidbits.

MR. SANGER : It wasn’t that bad. (Laughter.)

MS. LAKSHMANAN : Well, some of it – some of it you actually didn’t have to press your ear to the door because it could be overheard. And I’m talking about the really emotional moments, when, you know, John Kerry and Javad Zarif, his opposite number from Iran, were really going at it because they realized they were – you know, they were fighting over every detail, over every comma and T that was being crossed in this document. And there was one point where Kerry’s aides told us where he really didn’t know if this was going to happen. He didn’t know if Zarif had the backing of Iran’s supreme leader to get this deal done, and at one point John Kerry said to him, you know, do you even want this? And they were yelling at each other so much that the German foreign minister, who we discovered through this whole process has a quite dry sense of humor, said the next day, oh, I understand you had a very constructive meeting last night; the whole hotel could hear you. (Laughter.) You know, it ended up – so there were several of these fights that really burst out into the open because literally the rest of the hotel could hear them.

And then, in the end, it came to a very emotional moment, which was described to me by a few different delegations, not just by the Americans, before we think that they’re saying it self-servingly. But it was at the final moment, when all of the foreign ministers from the P5+1 countries, the great powers, and Iran met together in this room at the United Nations in Vienna. We were not in this room. And privately – they asked everyone to leave except a few key aides, and privately they said, OK, this is it, we’ve got it now. And the moment kind of sank in slowly, and everyone was kind of in awe. And then each foreign minister in order – alphabetical order of his country said something. And the French foreign minister said this is Bastille Day and I hope that this deal has the same great history as Bastille Day for us. And the Iranian foreign minister said this is the opening, the end of our isolation, and I hope that this can lead to new beginnings. And John Kerry said, I went to war in Vietnam as a young man at age 22, and then he sort of stopped because he choked up and his voice broke. And he had to collect himself, and he said, and ever since then I have felt that you have to exhaust every diplomatic possibility before resorting to war. And literally, we were told by multiple delegations, that everyone clapped, all the foreign ministers clapped, which was the first time anything like that had been done in two years of negotiations. And apparently also a few of the Iranian diplomats were wiping their eyes.

MS. IFILL : A lot of emotion.

MS. LAKSHMANAN : Pretty emotional, yeah.

MS. IFILL : Well, you know that story must have made its way to the White House, Michael. Maybe that fueled some of the president’s, I don’t know, almost indignation about what was great about this deal that he was certainly going to sell, and kind of the way he – (laughs) – he forced the point on the reporters in the room in his news conference. You were there.

MR. CROWLEY : Yeah. So one of my colleagues wrote a story whose headline was “Drama Obama.” You know, the cool president at this press conference was raring to go. His body language, everything about his presentation, including some improvisation, which I’ll explain, really signaled, number one, how immersed in the details of this process he was. I mean, he is fluent in this – in this deal. And he believes firmly that reason and facts and logic and science are all on his side, and he’s primed for the debate. His argument is that my opponents haven’t even read the thing, they don’t have a realistic alternative, and they are illogical. And he’s so eager to make this argument that, among other things, when the topic shifted from Iran – which had been the topic of the press conference for 45 minutes or so – to Bill Cosby and prison reform, he said, I had some other things I wanted to say about Iran you guys haven’t asked me. And he consults this list of notes and he says, let’s see here. And he’s saying things like, well, inspections, sunset, have we gotten to that? The reporters start calling things out. And I think it’s been –

MS. IFILL : Now, if I’m a reporter in that room, I’m kind of insulted because he doesn’t trust me to have a smart question.

MR. CROWLEY : There was an implication that, you know, you guys haven’t asked all the good questions. Then it’s a free-for-all, and I don’t know that the – a White House briefing has been like that in – a presidential briefing – in decades, where people are shouting things out and he’s just responding and it’s all kind of broken down. But he was loving it, and he was joking that, you know, I really enjoy this debate, and I think he wants more of it.

Now, the question is, is he right? I think sometimes – you know, I think a little bit of the Obamacare debate, where I think he thought, you know, the facts and the – and the data is on my side, and what was he confronted with? Death panels. And I think he’s going to have a similar frustration with Congress this time.

MS. IFILL : One final thing we want to talk about which we managed not to get to magically on the program was Donald Trump. When we talk about money, we talk about Donald Trump, right? Let’s listen what he had to say this week when he was asked whether he was raising money.

DONALD TRUMP : (From video.) A friend of mine comes up. He said, I want to give you – a rich guy – I want to give you a lot of money. I said, you know, honestly, don’t – I don’t need it.

MS. IFILL : He doesn’t need it, but he’s only raised about a million dollars on his own outside of his own pocket.

MS. CUMMINGS : Well, but that’s without asking for a penny. I mean, if anything, what that is – we always talk about how fundraising is the first measure of voter support. Well, in the case of Trump, it truly is. He didn’t ask for any of that. That all just came in. So that – those were some voters who were casting their first vote.

Now, the Trump money, I just hope he stays in the race for a really long time because I want to keep writing about Donald Trump and his money. (Laughter.)

MS. IFILL : (Laughs.) Speak for yourself.

MS. CUMMINGS : He has spent a half a million dollars on airplanes. Who did he pay for those airplanes?

MS. IFILL : Himself.

MS. CUMMINGS : Donald Trump. (Laughter.) It’s just going to be amazing to – where – his headquarters is $10,000 a month in rent – at the Trump Tower. So this whole thing is just one big washing machine with Trump money all inside of it. (Laughter.)

Now, the other thing that we found is that he has what we’re calling a longshot candidate premium when it comes to hiring employees because, you know, we all know these aides go out, they give up their lives for almost two years, with the payback being a great big title inside the White House, right? Well, Trump, Dr. Carson, Bernie Sanders, mmm, maybe not. So they got to pay if they want a good strategist. Trump’s strategist – campaign manager is getting paid $250,000 a year.

MS. IFILL : Wow.

MS. CUMMINGS : That is almost double what Mitt Romney paid his campaign manager in the last cycle. So we – and we have seen the same with Carson. Dr. Carson’s paying ($)210,000.

MS. IFILL : And the real cost will be which candidates fall out because Trump is still in.

Well, thank you, everybody. If you’re dying for more, be sure to check out my take online, where I write this week on the topic, who do these candidates think they are? And we’ll see you here next time on the Washington Week Webcast Extra .